What is this thing called “freedom”? If you are Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, the right to bear arms is “freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea.” At the same time, according to the current logic of the US Supreme Court’s right-wing majority, its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade “asserted raw judicial power to impose . . . a uniform viability rule that allowed the States less freedom to regulate abortion than the majority of western democracies enjoy.”

On the one hand, then, freedom in action appears to mean the capacity of an eighteen-year-old to buy military-grade assault weapons that he can then use to murder nineteen school children and two adults. On the other hand, conservative judges can invoke freedom against the rights of women to bodily autonomy. In more general terms, freedom can simultaneously mean the freedom of individuals from the state and the freedom of the state to impose its will on individuals.